Q: Let’s talk about sexual assault. In 2012, the Corps had the highest rate of unwanted sexual contact among the services. We’re talking physical touching, not harassment. Since then you’ve spoken at length about how you are trying to stop this behavior among Marines. Have you done enough?

A: We are doing as much as we know at this point we can. We actually began the effort in May of 2012. We pulled together an operational planning team before sexual assault became huge in Congress and the press and everything. We had started working on how we could reshape the Marine Corps, including everything from the legal processes to the care of our victims. We had about six months under our belt in the campaign plan. So the numbers substantiated for me that we had a problem and that we need to do something about it.

Our females didn’t trust the command. They didn’t trust that they would not be re-victimized if they came forward. They did not trust that their command would take them seriously and prosecute or do the correct thing on the investigations. They didn’t think the command would care for them.

We have spent the last year and a half trying to make sure that we have turned that around. And I think we have. The numbers of reports doubled this last year. That is an indication that the message is getting out. The numbers of prosecutions have more than doubled. Convictions have more than doubled. The amount of sentence time, adjudicated time by the judge or the jury, has almost tripled. We’ve tripled the amount of restricted reports that converted to unrestricted, for investigation or prosecution.

We do command climate surveys for our commanding officers now. The consistent feedback we are getting is there is a greater degree now of confidence. They feel safer. Those are early returns. We are working really hard on it right now, so there is more to be done. We have a long ways to go and a lot of it deals with respect.

Q: The Marine Corps historically has been a macho, male-dominated institution. It has the smallest percentage of females among the services. The Corps is defined by its infantry, and women aren’t allowed to serve in that field. So how far can you go toward stamping out sexual assault?

A: The answer is zero. What you want is zero. We are part of society. But I don’t hang my hat on that because we are better than that. Our Marines go through a transformation. We talk about ethics. We talk about values. We talk about caring for one another.

It is a culture shift, and it is going to take a while. But we are not going to be patient. We are aggressively going after this, and that should drive the prevalence down.

Commandership plays a heavy role in how you change culture. Marines are very quick to begin to sniff out the left and right lateral limits of acceptable behavior in a unit, by virtue of how the commanding officer and the sergeant major, what standards they set. We have units that have considerably less things going on, bad things like DUIs, reckless driving, sexual assault, suicides, spousal abuse. You look at their numbers, and you go, wow, how does this happen? It happens because the commanding officer says we don’t do that in this unit.